Saputello

errata corrige: prevened instead of received in the third line.

"It seems to me that there is too much acrimony on your part towards Vai." Of course there is, if I am convinced that someone is worthless, there is always a certain vigor in the arguments I present, and I regret it because then my interlocutor might become resentful towards me. In any case, I’ve already said what I needed to say about his work as a musician; there you will find arguments, not insults. I said that in my opinion he is not capable of composing music, he lacks in terms of ideas, I have argued this, and if you really believe there is something so interesting in his way of doing and playing, I think we could be here for years each stating our own views, but I felt it was right to express things as I see them. Regards.

Moreover, compositionally (and not just as an arranger), he is truly a shallow artist; he fails to develop harmony except in the deafening succession of solos with a guitar bloated by effects (effects that lack meaning and only serve to inflate the sound). His pieces need to be built first on the solo, then on the rest, and you can feel it: in fact, the few times he finds an interesting harmony, he drags it all the way to the end of the song. Then, of course, we cannot take into account his singing skills (embarrassing) or the fact that when he picks up an acoustic guitar it makes you want to vomit; we shouldn't consider that his collaborators have always been within the realm of super-technicians. He has never been able to break free from those clichés of electric rock guitar from the academy, and with *Sex and Religion,* he reached the pinnacle of sonic garbage. The beauty of it is that his fame is innocuous in relation to the rest of music, because he has carved out his market niche in the realm I described earlier about academies, and from there he just can't escape, poor guy.

"The eccentricity of Vai is based on nonsense, on exaggeration; it is certainly not as engaged and cultured as Zappa's, but it is nonetheless a very precise choice." Exactly, it is a very precise choice, to the point that I suspect it has now become a marketing decision, marketing for followers of extreme electric guitar. In my opinion, you are confusing extremism with art; not everything that is pursued in an extreme manner is art, especially if the extremism comes from the most flashy and external factors of an artist. Then, flashiness needs to be connected to some idea, to some concept rich in content if one wants to transform it into art, which is something Steve Vai has never managed to do. Additionally, the productions of his albums have a sound completely devoid of any taste, pompous with arrangements reminiscent of TV themes (though that is difficult), and when he tries to do a sweet solo, he often falls into a banal and purely academic guitar rhetoric and gets lost in harmonies resembling a national anthem.

Forgive me, but I have to go now; I’m off to listen to simpler things than Steve Vai, oh no, because Vai is for Music Critics, for true connoisseurs, he is a VERY DIFFICULT author. In fact, he tops the charts of any music critic, even those in jazz and classical, but only them because he’s really hard to understand ahahahah. Because he uses the whammy, does atonal scales, it’s DIFFICULT to listen to, because he has so many pairs of glasses (one of the many lessons LEARNED from Frank Zappa), because he plays the guitar with three necks. No really, I will never understand him (so much that at 14 I blasted Passion and Warfare at full volume convinced that it was god, but that lasted only until my baby teeth changed), so I’m going to listen to Hot Rats by Frank Zappa (not those SHITTY ALBUMS where Steve Vai is also present), then I’ll download Edgar Varese (since you know Zappa, you’ll surely understand the importance of the composer to Zappa), and Captain Beefheart, whom you surely listen to and understand with far too much ease, given that you already listen to the DIFFICULT, the COMPLICATED, the CONCEPTUAL, the one with many rings and sunglasses. One of the many lessons he learned from Frank Zappa.

"there are those who are thrown by Topo Gigio though" ------> Exactly, the fans of Steve Vai.

The beauty of it is that behind Zappa's eccentric attitude there was substance, a deep critique of American society; moreover, there was his music, disorienting and embarrassingly genius in its compositional content, not technical. Steve Vai is not a composer, nor is he a brilliant guitarist; he lacks even a hint of the cultural and almost singer-songwriter depth of Zappa. He was subversive only for sixteen-year-olds who grab the Ibanez Steve Vai series and are impressed by the guitar showmanship. Idolized by a losing faction of wanking guitarists, outside the guitar community, nobody pays attention to him, except for academics with a diploma from the Lizard in hand. There I go, I've fallen into the mistake, I'm brushing my teeth with the toilet brush, I've fallen into the futility of a discussion on Steve Vai, but it’s stronger than me: when a spastic mentions him in the same breath as Frank Zappa just because he was launched by Frank Zappa, it makes my hands itch.

Beautiful piece of shit record. I'm going to listen to the first Pearl Jam albums now.

The futility of a discussion about Steve Vai. It's like using a toilet brush to clean your teeth.

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